Thursday, October 26, 2006

The last thing you want to find when you roll out of bed one morning, sky still dark, neck a little sore, is a beloved pet who has ingested a piece of plastic three times as big as his head. This would be Le Pew, the more devious of my two guinea pigs, and what he ate was everything but the contents in a green bag of hay. In case you’re expecting some kind of parable about packaging, well, don’t. I couldn’t have imagined a more delicious manifestation of consumable marketing for me and mine.

Obviously I plied my little buddy with fiber, spurred ever onward by my imaginary competency in the veterinary arts, and during the deathwatch that curious inverse relationship became particularly sharp: you know, where something you took for granted suddenly becomes immeasurably valuable and equally unattainable. But the little bastard survived, as is the nature of guinea pigs in the march of science, and normalcy has returned to this corner of Charlotte.

Firefox 2.0 is out, by the by, and I’m almost certain it’s faster. It’s also more infuriating, because in its quest to streamline user experience, it apparently streamlined the address bar right out of there. The address bar, understand. The special feature that lets you surf anywhere other than your homepage. If you’re in the same boat, just right-click the gray up top, hit “Customize,” drag in a “Space,” and then drag in the “Location Bar.” Simple, right? In our next installment, we’ll take a quick look at how to press the space bar in 34 easy steps.